One of the most tangible sets of changes associated with the fall of the Western Roman Empire was that which affected the monetary system. By AD 600 the multi-tiered late Roman currency had shrivelled to a shadow of its former self. Copper-alloy issues, which for most of the populace had been the principal coins utilized on a day-to-day basis, were effectively gone, as were those in silver. Little local production of unofficial coin to plug this gap took place (as had happened in the third-century West, and parts of the fifth-century East), suggesting a genuine collapse of the mechanisms which had supported small-scale monetized exchange. This slump forms part of a wider picture of drastic simplification in exchange and economy, the pace and extent of which varied province to province
